WHAT´S NEW?

Help needed!
No, wait! This is not about money donations!

During the last months it has become harder and harder (to almost impossible) for me to fill in the missing pieces on this page, so I kindly want to ask
for your help with the following "to-do"s on my list:

I am still missing some original packages, so if you have one of the following and might be willing to sell it for a reasonable price, trade it for some of my spare packages
(not just Magnetic Scrolls) or even donate it to the "Memorial Collection", I would be very grateful! For some of the packages I do not even have a disk image for
reference, marked with a (!). So if you do have one of these packages and also have a disk image of the game, I would be very grateful for a copy, too!
What I am missing (the Myth packages are here as reference, I guess these are out of play):
Jinxter: Archimedes, Macintosh, Spectrum +3
Corruption: Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple2, Macintosh, Spectrum+3
Fish!: Apple2(!), Macintosh(!)
Myth: Amiga, C64, IBM PC 3.5", IBM PC 5.25"

Magnetic Scrolls released special game packages for the french market which - like the german packages - partly contained documentation in french language.
Unfortunately I know rather few about the french packages and would be very grateful for information on which parts of the packages were available in french.
Perfect would be if you can also provide me with scans of the french materials.

My list of the known adventure guides is incomplete because some of my packages were not complete anymore when I got it. So it would be great if you can
check your boxes if you find an adventure guide that is not on my list so far and create hi-res scans, photos,... anything that is
appropriate for you!

Many, many thanks for listening and your ongoing help and support!

June 2017

The Pawn - Remastered

The Pawn - Remastered is now also available for desktops: Windows, macOS, and Linux:

Strand Games is born...

It has been some time since the last update, but there was a good reason for this. There is incredible news. In the last months a new initiative emerged: Strand Games.

Strand Games was started by Hugh Steers - co-founder of Magnetic Scrolls and core developer. This initiative aims nothing less than preserving the works of Magnetic Scrolls,
remastering the games to make them fun to play on modern devices and creating new adventures based on the Magnetic Scrolls technology and the follow-up Brahman.

The initiative is supported by members of the original Magnetic Scrolls team: Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon, Rob Steggles, and Servan Keondjian. Besides as much as possible
of Magnetic Scrolls' work will be preserved, restored from the original backups.

What does this mean? For the first time in over 25 years the games become officially available again. But there
is much more. There will be remastered versions of the games that are tailored for mobile devices! The remastering adds many enhancements to the games to increase the play comfort and remove shortcomings of the original games while preserving the story line: touch interface, auto-mapping, multi-undo,
auto-undeath, and much more...

A public beta version of The Pawn Remastered for Android is available in the Google Play Store:

Versions for Windows, macOS, Linux are in the works. An IOS version will follow soon after.
The Android version costs $0.99 and unfortunately Google charges you for betas, either. But of course, this includes the final version. This money is only used for the hosting costs,
the developer fees (Apple) and for restoring the original Magnetic Scrolls source code (which will be made available!)

This journey has just begun...

June 2016

Welcome to the all new (and not so new) Magnetic Scrolls Memorial!

After procrastinating for a very long time about modernizing the Memorial pages - say getting rid of the almost 20 years old mess of Dreamweaver template code, HTML inline formatting and
horrible table cascades - I finally got around to rewriting the pages.

To the long term visitors much of the "new" Memorial
will look familiar. So at first sight you might wonder, what took me so long. But while the overall site structure has only slightly changed and of course the content was preserved, every single page
was rewritten by hand (almost 100 pages). The first thought was to rebuild the pages with a CMS - and there are some pretty cool CMS out there.

However, the Memorial uses quite a bunch of different page layouts which had to be rebuilt with the CMS and after it took me so long to get rid of the Dreamweaver leftovers I was really loath to
surrender to the next system. Eventually I decided to go without a
CMS and code by hand (and the help of a great free framework called Groundwork CSS). The design of the site surely ever was and still is quite colourful and not in line with mainstream designs, but it is an oldskool page about
oldskool stuff. Using a slick buisness design just did not feel right to me. So here it is...

But there is even more: The pages should be fully responsive now. The fonts should better adapt to the different devices, so general readability should be better. Many, many things were fixed and many
minor or major additions are scattered all over the site.

Hope, you enjoy the new Memorial pages. Please let me know if you encounter problems. Surely there are things to be fixed in the weeks to come, but now
that the site is in a maintanable state again, fixing problems and adding new materials should be much easier than before.

March 2016

Small note to Magnetic Scripts users: Unfortunatley the mail activation routine for the server repository accounts had a nasty bug which prevented the
activation under certain conditions. Sorry for the trouble. I didn't know about the problem until today. If you tried to register for a save game repository and were not able
to complete the activation with the activation mail, please register and activate once more. I hope, it is fixed now!

A real update to the site and Magnetic Scripts will follow soon. Stay tuned.

December 2015

Real life has interfered, so the next major update of Magnetic Scripts will have to wait some more time. But just in case you have no idea what to do with all the free
time over the winter holidays, I decided to push at least a small update to Magnetic Scripts, that fixes some of the bugs found so far:

Fixed max allowed same game number (now 100).

Myth hints fixed plus lot of minor fixes

And even some minimal enhancements: New loader screen, optimized "more" tablet handling, tested against ios9 Safari and MS Edge browser

A real update with some new features will follow next year. Stay tuned.

October 2015

This update brings to your enjoyment...

Several new adventure guides. As I finally got my grips onto a french package there is also the first adventure guide in french language included.

The german and french game packages included translations or summaries of game manuals in the respective language. Added the german and french manuals for Jinxter,
and the german manual for The Guild of Thieves.

The following update will most probably focus on the next version of Magnetic Scripts... my todo list grew up to 50 entries, so it seems it gets time to work on it.
Besides I will start with some under the hood work on the pages (e.g. getting rid of the Dreamweaver chains from the past and cleaning up the huge CSS/non-CSS mess).
This might lead to some inconsistencies in the layout and appearance from time to time, but I plan to work steadily on it instead of the big overhaul that never gets finished.

September 2015

This update only brings a bunch of smaller additions and fixes:

Added version numbers for the PCW releases of The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter.

The fact sheet was complemeted accordingly, together with some other minor additions.

Link to Anita Sinclair's profile page at the British Bridge Union.

The direct play button on the game pages link to Magnetic Scripts now.

Cleaned up the links section and added a couple of new links (that should have been added long ago)

Added a handful of solutions, taken from scans by Howard Feldman from mocagh.org with kind permission.

June 2015

30th anniversary of The Pawn

In 1985 the era of Magnetic Scrolls began with the release of QL-Pawn. To celebrate the anniversary this update adds two new
opportunities to dive into the worlds of Magnetic Scrolls:

The Magnetic Scripts engine runs Magnetic Scrolls games directly in the browser. It is a port of Niclas Karlsson's great Magnetic interpreter to HTML5 and Javascript
and has almost all features of the native Magnetic versions. Some highlights:

Saving an restoring games is supported. With most of the current browsers you even get a persistent storage, so your save games are stored across game sessions.

Save game files from Magnetic Scripts can be used with native interpreters.

Optional save game storage on the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial server. Sync your save games across different clients.

Supports HTML Fullscreen mode.

Pictures and music are supported. On desktop machines, the Wonderland music is real Midi playback. Pictures can be scaled at runtime.

Integrated hint system based on the original hints from the manuals.

The classic games support both the Amiga 16bit graphics and the C64 8bit graphics.

Pure HTML and Javascript: No Java or Flash required!

Note: Magnetic Scripts uses current HTML and Javascript inventions, so you need a recent browser! The Magnetic Scripts starting page contains various compatibility
notes and configuration hints. Click the Magnetic Scripts logo to get started now!

There is even more Javascript. For the first time you can try out the original QL-Pawn yourself. Click the logo for heading over to the QL-Pawn page and give it a try.